Goodbye oil! MIT discovers artificial photosynthesis!

Stan Beer
Saturday, 02 August 2008 06:59

Science - Energy

The chief professor of energy at MIT and a fellow researcher have discovered a cheap way to mimic the way plants store energy from the sun and say that it will enable homes and electric cars to be run entirely on solar power and fuel cells. The energy nirvana has been found and could signal the era of centralised power distribution they say.

Professor Daniel Nocera, the Henry Dreyfus Professor of Energy at MIT, and Matthew Kanan, a postdoctoral fellow in Nocera's lab, have developed a new process that splits water into Hydrogen and Oxygen gases at room temperature in much the same way that plants use sunlight to split water during photosynthesis.

Long hailed as the future salvation of makind's energy problems, solar power has suffered from the lack of a cheap, efficient and easily implemented storage solution for continuous power when the sun doesn't shine. Nocera and Kanan's discovery promises to provide the missing link in the formula to see off the era of non-renewable, polluting fossil fuels.

MIT has described the discovery as a revolutionary leap that could transform solar power from a marginal, boutique alternative into a mainstream energy source.

The key component in Nocera and Kanan's new process is a new catalyst that produces oxygen gas from water; another catalyst produces valuable hydrogen gas. The new catalyst consists of cobalt metal, phosphate and an electrode, placed in water. When electricity -- whether from a photovoltaic cell, a wind turbine or any other source -- runs through the electrode, the cobalt and phosphate form a thin film on the electrode, and oxygen gas is produced.

Combined with another catalyst, such as platinum, that can produce hydrogen gas from water, the system can duplicate the water splitting reaction that occurs during photosynthesis.

"This is the nirvana of what we've been talking about for years," said Professor Nocera, the senior author of a paper describing the work in the July 31 issue of Science. "Solar power has always been a limited, far-off solution. Now we can seriously think about solar power as unlimited and soon."

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